


The Unavoidable Badness of Season 9: X-Files, "4-D"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [25]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: 4-d, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, x files season 9
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 20:35:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2242683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In “Daemonicus,” the Satan-possessed doctor tells Doggett he’ll never be able to compete with Mulder. I think the bigger problem here is that Reyes is completely unequipped to compete with Scully. But at any rate, Doggett & Reyes, as a partnership, cannot even come CLOSE to competing with Mulder & Scully. "4-D" is not a bad plot. It's not badly written. But you just can’t watch something like “4-D” without thinking about how much better it would have been with Mulder and Scully in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unavoidable Badness of Season 9: X-Files, "4-D"

 

 

So, I’m forging on through Season 9 now. I predict that Agent Monica Reyes will remain the biggest obstacle to my enjoyment of this season. Not just because I don’t like either the character—whose fuzzily inuitive approach to her work makes her the kind of feelings-driven feminine cliche that Scully’s character was supposed to subvert—or the actress who plays her, whose delivery and facial expressions I find almost unbearably flat, monotonous, and unengaging. It’s because Reyes’s area of expertise is ritualistic murder, which means that Season 9 will draw in a lot more low-grade horror-movie crap like “Daemonicus,” a Satan-driven episode that makes so little sense and involves people acting so stupidly that it just makes you wish you were watching “Die Hand die Verletzt,” with all its flaws, instead. 

"4-D" is different, though. It’s written by Steven Maeda, who seems to be capable of writing in a way that is, if not thrillingly awesome, at least not bad. Maeda was behind the mildly interesting "Redrum," the really almost compelling "Vienen," and the nostalgia-inducing if kind of medically impossible "Brand X." And it’s the kind of plot that, while it’s not exactly in the X-Files’ wheelhouse, might really have been affecting if it had been done a few seasons earlier with Mulder and Scully instead of Doggett and Reyes. Plus it is also a correction of an obscure original-series Star Trek episode called "The Alternative Factor," in which a concept that had great potential was ruined by unbelievably crappy execution. I say this with some confidence because when Reyes explains to Doggett what she thinks is really going on, his response is, "Too much Star Trek." There are many Star Trek alternate-quantum-reality stories in various iterations; I know they did at least one on TNG (all I remember about it is that the color of Worf’s birthday cake kept changing). But the basic concept of "4-D"—a man chasing a deranged killer accidentally crosses over into another dimension—is the same concept used in "The Alternative Factor," in which a man named Lazarus pursues his antimatter double back and forth between two different universes, hoping to stop him from destroying both. 

Briefly, in “4-D,” we open with a sequence in which Reyes is tracking a woman-killer named Lukesh through the foyer of his apartment building while Doggett, Skinner, and Brad Fullmer (nobody told me Cary Elwes was in season nine; why didn’t they get HIM to participate in [Naked Day](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/96131896944/x-files-actors-studio-presents-the-naked-time)?) watch from a surveillance van. Reyes gets him into a stairwell, where he cuts her throat, steals her gun, and runs to the roof. Doggett finds him there; but he disappears, then reappears behind him, shooting him. After the credits, we see an unharmed Reyes moving in to her new apartment while an unharmed Doggett drops by with a gift of Polish sausage. Reyes gets a call from Skinner telling her they just found Doggett on the roof, he’s been shot and they’re taking him to the hospital. An understandably confused Reyes looks back to where Doggett was, and he’s gone. Doggett’s now in the hospital, nearly paraylzed, communicating by tapping with one finger on a readout device as Reyes tries to figure out WTH is going on. She eventually deduces that there are two parallel universes, each with its own Doggett, Reyes, Skinner, etc., and that Lukesh is able to escape at will from Reyes’s universe to Universe Prime, where he rampages as a serial killer who specializes in cutting out women’s tongues. Doggett Prime, she reasons, unwittingly followed Lukesh back into Reyes’s universe, causing Reyes’s Doggett to get booted out into Universe Prime. Doggett Prime believes the solution—and this is something he tells Monica only—is for her to turn off his life support, so that after he dies, the original Doggett will be able to return to his own universe. This she eventually does—and finds herself right back in her apartment with Doggett and everything is as it was right after the credits…only she remembers everything. 

Intellectually, I find this interesting as a sort of new take on the alternate-universe. Unlike ST:TOS’s “Mirror, Mirror” and “The Alternative Factor,” “4-D” confines itself almost entirely to the ‘real’ universe; only the teaser takes place in Universe Prime, and at the time that we’re watching it, we don’t know that. This is appropriate for the X-Files, where the fact that neither Reyes nor the viewer can be entirely sure that her theory is accurate—or that Doggett Prime’s assumptions about what will happen when she unplugs him are accurate—creates the kind of uncertainty and paranoia that defined the show. So does the fact that, since Doggett Prime was shot with Reyes Prime’s gun, Reyes herself is under investigation for much of this episode. And in the scene where Reyes finally turns off Doggett Prime’s machinery, I almost was not irritated by Gish’s performance, which was nearly adequate, and was almost sad to see Doggett die.

It’s not a bad plot. It’s not badly written. There are some nice little touches in the writing for Lukesh, the universe-hopping killer who invented his serial-killer Universe Prime self—in classic serial-killer fashion—as a way of dealing with his mother issues. In the ‘real’ universe, Lukesh is the full-time caretaker of his bedridden mother. She’s a sweet old lady, and he loves her, but the fact that caring for her is Lukesh’s whole life is driving him insane; and the scene in which he finally kills her is, for a serial killer plot, unusually complicated and affecting. It’s really not anyone’s fault that it just doesn’t really come to life. 

In “Daemonicus,” the Satan-possessed doctor tells Doggett he’ll never be able to compete with Mulder. As I’ve said, I think the bigger problem here is that Reyes is completely unequipped to compete with Scully, whose role in Season 9 will apparently be minimal except for episodes that involve her miracle baby. But at any rate, Doggett & Reyes, as a partnership, cannot even come CLOSE to competing with Mulder & Scully. You just can’t watch something like “4-D”—at least I can’t—without thinking about how much better it would have been with Mulder and Scully in it. An episode in which Scully has to make the decision to pull the plug on Mulder based on nothing more than her faith in a highly implausible AU scenario which nobody else in her universe really believes—OR! even BETTER! An episode in which Mulder has to pull the plug on Scully for the same reasons, thereby having to put his money where his mouth is in a way that terrifies him more than any decision he’s ever made before…now THAT’s something you could make really GOOD. Of course there have been too many M&S die-and-come-backs by now, but if this was, say, season 4…two years after Mulder fought Scully’s mom over the decision to remove her from life support while she was in her post-abduction coma, he has to actually make that decision knowing that Scully’s life is riding on whether he’s right or not…you can see what I mean, right? Let alone the fact that (in this last scenario) Scully Prime, lying on her hospital bed, knows that ‘her’ Mulder is dead in her home universe…OH THE HUMANITY. OH THE FEELS. 

We just can’t feel that way about Doggett and Reyes. Not just because of who they are, but because of how they are with each other. Maybe Reyes does have a thing for Doggett; but right now it’s kind of one-sided and sad. What Doggett feels about Reyes we don’t really know. They have some kind of history based on his son’s death, but we haven’t seen much of it. It’s not their fault; but we just can’t care about this plot the way we could have if it had been done a few seasons earlier.

Ah well. On we go.


End file.
